Keira Knightley Trapped In Pirate-Land

A new Japanese trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: Give Us Gold—I legit can’t remember the title and I JUST watched the trailer, not a great sign—was released yesterday and it spoils what I assume was to be a surprise for fans of the franchise (do those still exist?). Keira Knightley appears briefly in the trailer, so Elizabeth Swann is back for Pirates F*CKING FIVE, REALLY? I would like to know how this went down, since it was widely assumed she wouldn’t be returning. It’s not like she needs it—unlike Orlando Bloom, she has successfully established a career outside Pirate-Land. So how did they suck her back in? Did she run over someone’s dog? Does she owe Johnny Depp a favor? Did they trap her?

Also, Brenton “Eyebrows” Thwaites is apparently playing the son of Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner. That’s pretty great casting—he does bear a resemblance to (younger) Orlando Bloom. But it infuriates me that, as he appears twenty-ish, the timeline of this movie must now be somewhere around 1760-1770. By that time, Caribbean piracy was thirty years past its sell-by date and I KNOW, Lainey, I’m a huge nerd. It just drives me nuts that these movies f*cked their timeline so bad. (Lainey: really? We're quibbling about historical accuracy in THESE movies?) They were trying to be coy in the beginning and just exist somewhere in the Golden Age of Piracy, but they explicitly date the last movie in the 1750s. By the most generous estimate, the Golden Age ended by 1730. So now we’re having pirate adventures in a time when there weren’t really any pirates. Pirates 5 may or may not have bigger problems, just know I will be stewing about the timeline the whole time.